n end, that, when his eyes had been opened to its presence,
he clutched--like a drowning man who seizes upon a spar--clutched and
held fast to his talent. But the necessary insight into his powers had
first to be gained, for it was not one of those talents which, from the
beginning, strut their little world with the assurance of the peacock.
He was, it is true, gifted with an instinctive feeling for the value
and significance of tones--as a child he sang by ear in a small, sweet
voice, which gained him the only notice he received at school, and he
easily picked out his notes, and taught himself little pieces, on the
old-fashioned, silk-faced piano, which had belonged to his mother as a
girl, and at which, in the early days of her marriage, she had sung in
a high, shrill voice, the sentimental songs of her youth. But here, for
want of incentive, matters remained; Maurice was kept close at his
school-books, and, boylike, he had no ambition to distinguish himself
in a field so different from that in which his comrades won their
spurs. It was only when, with the end of his schooldays in sight, he
was putting away childish things, that he seriously turned his
attention to the piano and his hands. They were those of the pianist,
broad, strong and supple, and the new occupation soon engrossed him
deeply; he gave up all his spare time to it, and, in a few months,
attained so creditable a proficiency, that he went through a course of
instruction with a local teacher of music, who, scenting talent,
dismissed preliminaries with the assurance of his kind, and initiated
his pupil into all that is false and meretricious in the literature of
the piano--the cheaply pathetic, the tinsel of transcription, the
titillating melancholy of Slavonic dance-music--to leave him, but for
an increased agility of finger, not a whit further forward than he had
found him. Then followed months when the phantom of discontent stalked
large through Maurice's life, grew, indeed, day by day more tangible,
more easily defined; for there came the long, restless summer evenings,
when it seemed as if a tranquil darkness would never fall and bar off
the distant, the unattainable; and as he followed some flat, white
country road, that was lost to sight on the horizon as a tapering line,
or looked out across a stretch of low, luxuriant meadows, the very
placidity of which made heart and blood throb quicker, in a sense of
opposition: then the desire to have finished